How Obama used behavioral economics to win the election, and how he's using it to govern

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1889153,00.html

by gabrielroth • 17 years ago

53 68 17 years ago

sachinag• 17 years ago

It's like they respect science and the notion of evidence-based decision making or something.

Hell. Madison Avenue has always listened to the scientists. Evidence-based blah blah. It's propaganda. That it's good propaganda doesn't make it good in any other context.

jacoblyles5• 17 years ago

They are experts at manipulating perception.

jaytee_clone3• 17 years ago

More than they used to, so that's a step up.

Still, I'd rather see these resource being spent on educating the public on behavioral economics as suppose to using the knowledge to manipulate the public.

It's true that in most situations, indirect persuasion is more effective at influencing someone's behavior than direct preaching. However, at some point, the public needs "grow up" too, and always treating us like five year olds certainly won't stimulate this process.

I hope these guys see that.

garndt• 17 years ago

"However, at some point, the public needs "grow up" too, and always treating us like five year olds certainly won't stimulate this process."

The public always has the ability to "grow up" as you put it but they do not want to. People are not motivated to take action if there isn't an immediate risk to their own personal well being. Risk has been taken out of many things that we do so now we can make ignorant choices without immediate consequences.

We keep falling off the bike, but instead of scraping our knee and learning not to fall, we have a security net there to save us over and over again.

I don't blame the government for treating us like 5 year olds when that is how a majority of people act.

mklurfeld• 17 years ago

Sort of fitting that a man who taught at the University of Chicago and who has Larry Summers for an advisor would use economics for more than just balancing a national budget.

patrickg-zill• 17 years ago

Wow, the Hopeychange flavored Kool-Aid hasn't run out yet!

kirse• 17 years ago

I agree, people want change but they hardly know what they're in for, especially with universal healthcare "reform"... Some other recent notable changes...

- push to eliminate US nuclear weapons

- encouraging an international currency and removing the US dollar from a position of power

- spending $3.55 trillion for 2010 ($400bn over '09), when we've already committed $12.8 trillion to the recession

- increasing the marginal tax rate to the highest levels since Clinton

- letting North Korea get away with launching missiles over Japan

- taking over private businesses and forcing out their CEOs

I guess you always need a Carter to usher in a Reagan.

...And bring on the drive-by downmods with no responses.

jacoblyles5• 17 years ago

>"Sort of fitting that a man who taught at the University of Chicago and who has Larry Summers for an advisor would use economics for more than just balancing a national budget."

I wish he would start with that.

ams6110• 17 years ago

Summary: people are irrational and make stupid decisions. The government knows better. Typical Time Magazine.

jacoblyles5• 17 years ago

Is this what normal people read all the time? I mean, they make statements like this with no clarification at all:

"Our emissions are boiling the planet, and most of our energy use is unnecessary."

What's "unnecessary"? Energy drives modern technology, from your desk to your home to your doctor's office. Sure, if you don't care about quality of life, then energy use is unnecessary.

And while most scientists think our emissions are going to cause an increase in mean global temperatures over the next few centuries, "boiling the planet" is a long way off.

That's just one example out of a dozen. Is Time an editorial magazine, or is it supposed to be some sort of objective journalism?

That's not entirely a rhetorical question, I honestly don't follow dead tree media and never got into it much as a kid.

Kaizyn• 17 years ago

You must not read much mainstream media. Nearly every piece contains little nuggets like the one(s) you mention. It isn't just Time; they all do it. Not surprisingly, newspapers are struggling with their readers now leaving in droves.

dmfdmf• 17 years ago

I stopped reading Time, Newsweek, USNWR, etc whan I was in High School. Later I read that these magazines were written for 8-9th grade level. That was in the late '70s so I'm sure they are dumbing-down to the 5th grade level by now. Bad strategy. Also, and I'm going out on a limb here, but the internet really changes everything. The reporters have not been objective for decades but they are learning that they cannot get away with slop now that the internet exists. Exciting times!

mkn2• 17 years ago

"Our emissions are boiling the planet, and most of our energy use is unnecessary."

What's "unnecessary"? Energy drives modern technology, from your desk to your home to your doctor's office. Sure, if you don't care about quality of life, then energy use is unnecessary.

Really? This is your complaint? By 'unnecessary,' we can reasonably presume that the author means 'needlessly inefficient.' That much is evident to any sincere reader of the article who cares enough about the pursuit of knowledge to abide by the principle of charity: Put the best face on the argument before you refute it, otherwise you are not contributing.

The straw-man argument, "Sure, if you don't care about quality of life, then energy use is unnecessary," is wholly beside the point.

And while most scientists think our emissions are going to cause an increase in mean global temperatures over the next few centuries, "boiling the planet" is a long way off.

Again, this cannot be a serious complaint. The phrase 'boiling the planet' is clearly a metaphor. A surface reading would be that we're just raising the temperature of the planet to an unhealthy extreme. A more nuanced reading reveals that the author means that we are raising the temperature of the planet to such a high temperature that we are going to cause irreversible change, such as when one boils food and finds that no amount of refrigeration will bring it back to it's former state. More simply, we are doing something analogous to sterilizing the planet, though to a lesser degree, in that many species may ultimately be made extinct.

That's not entirely a rhetorical question, I honestly don't follow dead tree media and never got into it much as a kid.

This is evident from the shallowness of your misguided critique. More practice at reading, dead-tree media or otherwise, might have made you a skillful enough reader to have been able to follow the plot here.

jeremyw• 17 years ago

most of our energy use is unnecessary -- from the article

Saul Griffith via Long Now lays out a nice engineer's estimation of factor 7-9x required drop in personal energy use; mostly through deprival: we become vegetarians, travel little, etc. Let's hope that's unnecessary.

http://fora.tv/2009/01/16/Saul_Griffith_Climate_Change_Recal...

kragen2• 17 years ago

Well, for example, a substantial fraction of our marketed energy use is devoted to heating and cooling (more than 50%); better building designs (like those from the Passivhaus program) essentially eliminate that, at a minimal additional construction cost. A lot of what's left is transportation; a switch from trucks to trains, plus bicycles and local electric public transit for short-distance people-moving, plus better streamlining and saner traffic control, would eliminate the majority of that. Your laptop uses maybe 15 watts; your car is maybe 300 000 watts at full power. It's not a matter of eliminating "modern technology" but rather developing and deploying truly modern technology that focuses on energy efficiency.

ntoshev• 17 years ago

The article really mixes two messages: "behavioral economics works" and "Obama knows what's good for you". The second one is claimed without any evidence, so I chose to ignore it.

JulianMorrison• 17 years ago

People are irrational and do make stupid decisions, there's a ton of good science saying so, and there are good scientific explanations. We can't run 50mph and we can't not like high-flavor calories. No blame attaches - human nature is what it is. Equally, we are vulnerable to peer group norms and asymmetric treatment of opt-out versus opt-in. Again, science.

Connect those, and you get a way to manipulate humans into doing nonstupid things.

Should you do that? That's a question ethics, and maybe politics.

Can you? That's a question for science, and the answer seems to be yes.

mkn2• 17 years ago

First off, this isn't Digg or Reddit. Snarky, shallow, one-line summaries are generally not welcome here.

Second, your stupid summary is not supported by the text of the article.

people [sic] are irrational and make stupid decisions.

There is some truth to this if we take the best possible reading. Research continually shows that people do make decisions that are not supported by rational thinking. Bubbles arise in very simple trading games, even when there is an objective maximum to the item traded that falls well below the traded value, for example. There are countless other examples and a rich and growing literature on the subject. Thus, your first statement seems actually to be true, even if it was offered with sarcastic disdain.

The government knows better.

Again, neither your sarcastic disdain nor your parroting of a right-wing canard make this statement any less true as it pertains to this article. Given that the percentage of people making a given choice can be skewed by how the choice is offered, it seems a reasonable course of action to make the offer in such a way as to achieve the desired result. The decreased withholding example from the article is a brilliant case in point. The government really does know better which way to implement a tax cut in order to increase spending.

Typical Time Magazine.

At some point in your life you're going to have to start addressing the substance of arguments offered rather than considering the source. Maligning Time serves no purpose relevant to the discussion of whether or not the propositions offered in the article correspond to reality. It serves only to rehearse your own biases.

This is a forum for grown-ups. If you can't comport yourself in a manner appropriate to your peers, please remain silent.

Or, to put it in terms more fitting Digg or Reddit: Lurk Moar!

ellyagg3• 17 years ago

Good point. I think what he meant to say is that the article made sweeping generalizations about the quality of human decision making, resting on a few superficial stats and questionable assumptions. It also fetishized tricks to change folks' behavior while pretending that Obama's public policy goals are indisputable. Since one man's ideal world is not the same as another man's, and the form one's ideal world takes is generally governed by first principles that can't be proved, and since public policy is the means to transform the world into one's ideal, the notion that the administration's policies can't be criticized is ludicrously silly. Sure, I'm interested in the means, but it's by no means settled what the ends should be. (Nor will it ever be, I should add, as long as people are free to disagree.)

Anyone who has followed Time Magazine at all knows that this is typical of its writing.

davidw• 17 years ago

> Or, to put it in terms more fitting Digg or Reddit: Lurk Moar!

Or to put it in hacker news terms, flag the article (it's about politics and doesn't belong here) and move on.

anamax5• 17 years ago

>> The government knows better.

> Again, neither your sarcastic disdain nor your parroting of a right-wing canard make this statement any less true as it pertains to this article.

Hmm. Did govt know best during the Bush years?

Do you really want to argue that general skepticism towards govt is wrong? If it isn't, do you really want to argue that it's a "right-wing canard"?

Hint: saying that someone is "right-wing" or taking a right-wing position isn't actually a cogent argument. The folks who care about the lables either already agree or strongly disagree. The undecided don't care about the labels or the tribes. (Clue: "destroy Bush" was only the goal of leftwing fanboys.)

gills• 17 years ago

And here I thought they were all just incredibly stupid.

But this is worse, they've ejected rational thought entirely from the policy-making process.

We. Are. Doomed.

bk2• 17 years ago

This is a peeve of mine: It's not "behavioral economics". It's social and organizational psychology. Virtually all the research has been done by psychologists. For example, Daniel Kahneman, Economics Nobel Laureate, is a Psychologist.

"Smart" people and the media have been obsessed with "rationality", (pseudo-)math and quantitative research, until it finally emerged in the economistic world view that people are - surprise, surprise - not that rational; something that psychologists have known for ages.

Right now, economics is sort assimilating a lot of psychological insights, which is good for humanity, but it's not economics, the original creativity stems from psychology.

nazgulnarsil2• 17 years ago

you're working off the strawman version of rationality. people are are perfectly rational...from the perspective of small hunter gatherer tribes inconstant conflict for status and resources.

jaytee_clone3• 17 years ago

I totally agree with you.

We were evolved to be rational, but only in the environment that we evolved from. The environment we have now is far from small hunter-gatherer tribes, yet we are still equipped with the same rationale mechanisms. Hence, it's not working out perfectly.

Maybe if we restructure our society to simulate what it once was or at least some parts of it, we can better utilize our rationale mechanisms.

bk2• 17 years ago

The "rationality" that a lot of traditional (micro-)economic arguments are based on is the one defined by rational choice theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_choice_theory). While economics may be moving on, many journalists, business people, politicians, etc. have not yet gotten the memo, and operate based on very flawed assumptions.

I thus thus didn't use a straw man, but rather the operational definition of rationality traditionally employed by mainstream lines of economics.

You're onto something with your definition in that a lot of friction and inefficiency today originates from people not coping well with an environment that is fast-changing and very different from our environment of evolutionary adaptiveness.

jessep• 17 years ago

Often when I'm confronted with a policy suggestion I think, "I can't possibly know enough about the ecosystem that policy impacts to say whether the policy would succeed." Not being a domain expert in most issues, I reserve judgement on them. In this case, though, I don't.

As someone who obsesses about product design, usability etc., I just think accounting for real world factors of human behavior is always a good idea. I'm very happy to read this, and if you've ever noticed the difference between two layouts for conversions on your site (or any small detail that makes a huge behavioral difference), you should find this heartening too. Unless, of course, you oppose the goals of the policy or policymaker.

Kyderdog2• 17 years ago

ha I tricked Obama.. I had our accounted take out extra money so I will get my tax rebate in one big chunk when I file taxes.

How Obama used behavioral economics to win the election, and how he's using it to govern

Related Stories